Cody Cobb (b. 1984) is a photographer born in Louisiana and based in the Mojave Desert whose work captures brief moments of stillness in the wilderness of the American West.For weeks at a time he wanders alone into remote landscapes, using natural light and long solitude to picture what he calls an entanglement of observer and observed.,
His ongoing project Eons groups portraits of the Earth's surface made during long periods of solitude in the wilderness, where subtle arrangements of light and geometry create the illusion of structure.,In the related series Spectral, he projects ultraviolet light across desert shrubs and rock coves in Washington, Utah, California and New Mexico, revealing fluorescence in lichen, fallen leaves and bacteria growing in lava tubes that is invisible to the naked eye.Dead Roads documents landforms, ruins and roadside artifacts left by nearly two centuries of westward expansion across the United States, blurring the line between human and natural debris.
Cobb has also produced commissioned photography for publications including The New York Times and WIRED.In 2017 he collaborated with the design studio Six N. Five on Co-Existe, pairing his photographs of natural environments with their 3D-modeled sculptural forms.His work is represented by Marshall Gallery in Santa Monica and Foster/White Gallery, and has been recognized with the Aesthetica Art Prize.,Writing in Photograph Magazine in 2018, the critic Jon Feinstein described his practice as humbler than landscape photography's history of staking a claim to the land, noting that “it's not about conquering the wild and majestic; instead, he submits to a wilderness larger than us all”.
